Corning's East Asia chief technology officer Peter Bocko is an expert on new applications of glass in product design.
The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet had the opportunity to interview one of Corning Incorporated‘s leading visionaries on the future directions for glass in technology products. Since 2007, Dr. Peter L. Bocko has served as Corning’s chief technology officer for East Asia. He’s based in Japan, where his focus has been to find new business opportunities emerging in that strategic, technology-forward region. One of the world’s foremost experts in glass substrates for TFT-LCD, Bocko is uniquely positioned to offer insights into where glass may be headed next.
GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet: We’ve heard a lot about Corning’s product called Gorilla Glass, a super-hard glass ideally suited for mobile phone touch-screens which seem to be on every new phone coming out. What can you tell us about this material?
Peter Bocko: Gorilla Glass is an alkali-aluminosilicate thin-sheet glass that protects today’s electronic devices such as notebook PCs, televisions and mobile phones from the scratches, drops, and bumps of everyday use. Currently Gorilla Glass is available on 140 models in the market today, by 23 major brands, amounting to more than 200 million devices worldwide.
A Corning researcher tests the durability of an experimental glass by dropping a weighted ball from a set height.
GLASS: Is it really the strongest, most durable glass out there?
Bocko: To be precise in our use of terminology, Gorilla Glass is the most “damage-resistant glass” in this application. It is this damage resistance that makes Gorilla Glass a great choice for the consumer electronics design community because it retains a great look while at the same time increasing mechanical reliability of the device. Unlike conventional plastics and metals, Gorilla Glass is made to be damage-resistant through a chemical tempering which reinforces the surface and edges against mechanical stress.
To go a little more deeply into this, Gorilla Glass has been optimized for chemical tempering, and the protective layer which glass scientists call the “compressive stress layer”…I guess you could call it “glass armor plate”…is deep and uniform throughout the material. Because of this, Gorilla Glass allows the adoption of thinner glasses which brings a lot of value in sleek and lightweight consumer electronics. But what really attracts the design community to Gorilla Glass is the combination of durability in real-life use, a great look, and a cool touch that you just cannot get from plastics.
GLASS: Can you tell us about where this product may be headed next? Any new developments on the horizon you can talk about?
Bocko: In terms of designing Gorilla Glass into new devices, more than 90 new models will be released over the next six months. We are constantly looking for new applications for the technology. One of the great things about Gorilla Glass is that it’s bringing Corning’s scientific community in collaboration with the design community. You have no idea how much fun this is! I’ve spent most of my career working with the LCD panel manufacturers…electrical and chemical engineers mostly…I love these guys, but after 25 years it was getting boring! With Gorilla Glass we’re increasingly getting direct input for directions in new product development from designers. Obviously, much of this is confidential, but what I can say is that there are two key directions: larger and shapes.
We are scaling Gorilla Glass for large size whether it is an LCD TV that’s as large as a customer wants it, or public display. We’re also working on reforming flat sheets into shapes. We’re being told that there are a lot of applications in the home, public places, and autos that can leverage Gorilla Glass’ attractive features other than just protecting the front of a display. The possibilities are exciting: durable, scratch-resistant, three-dimensional glass surfaces enriching our environment. Well, exciting at least for a glass guy.
GLASS: There must be some upper-limit, isn’t there? Or could you make a screen as large as a building?
Bocko: Upper limit? Talk to a glass scientist and he’ll say almost anything is possible in the technical regime. Technology managers like me need to balance what’s possible in glass versus what’s practical and sufficiently valued to justify the development. Can we scale Gorilla Glass to a 5-meter dimension? Yeah, sure, but there may be other much more practical approaches to achieve the same effect. Will there ever be a virtually unbreakable glass? No, nothing’s unbreakable but our glass composition scientists are learning how to tune compositions to deliver optimum strength for the type of stress events that really matter to the user; and this work is on-going. Can Gorilla Glass be as thin as a human hair, flexible enough to wind around a pencil, and as tough as a half-millimeter Gorilla Glass sheet? Well, I’ll have to draw the line there; there are a few details in the physics that make that pretty unlikely.
GLASS: What can you tell us about the future of glass? Are there some new Corning technologies that you can talk about?
Bocko: I’ll be the first one to tell you how limited my line of sight in to the next big thing in glass. One of the things that’s happened time after time in Corning’s history is a glass invention that was intended for one purpose, and we find it enables something in a completely different field—sometimes decades later. There are many legacy capabilities that have promise for new life now that people are thinking about glass differently. If only I could see the next one coming!
I do say that this trend of revolution of glass as a design element is one of the most exciting developments in glass science since the start of the LCD revolution in the late-eighties. One of the other core capabilities of Corning is in light management (think optical fibers), and there are some exciting things coming out of the lab employing this skill set to flat glass for a unique approach to a consumer device’s “look”: color reflectivity, illumination. That’s all I can say about that now.
We’re working on glasses that can improve the practicality of thin-film solar energy, recently setting a work record with an innovation partner. And we’re making major commitments to the development of a long interest of ours, that is, combining our fusion glass-forming technology with ultra-thin flexible glass substrates. This will enable a variety of potential applications including, but not limited, to flexible e-Paper. Today we see its first application in e-Readers. The death of the printed images on paper in favor of electronic imaging may finally be on the horizon. These displays consume much less power than other technologies. However, when we show a video to our customers of a continuous roll of glass they get excited about the possibility of low-cost manufacture of a variety of green technologies, solar cells and solid state lighting that will replace the incandescent light. I think the possibilities of printed devices on thin flexible glass is endless!
In our headquarters there’s a wonderful collection of glass sculptures, and my favorite piece is a wonderful work by Dale Chihuly that I find inspiring. There is a phrase of his that I sometimes use in my customer discussions, and that is: “letting glass find its own form.” The possibilities of glass in both technical and artistic regimes continue to inspire us at Corning. Sometime we just have to get out of the way!
